Inside Outside (13 page)

My father in 1942 — defending the country that, as it turned out, did not want to defend him.

Photograph taken in 1946—I think—when I was nine or ten, but somehow I seem younger. Could it be 1942-3, when I was six or seven?

Arrival in Sydney.

The
Honi Soit
office c. 1957. Robert Hughes is in the foreground. Also pictured are David Solomon, Elizabeth Stafford and Martin Davey.

At my 21st birthday party, with,
left to right:
Jan Spratt, Robert Hughes, Christina Dennis and Jennifer Baume.

On the way to England in 1960, with Jill Kitson on my left. The suntan acquired on the five-week voyage did much to confuse people about my national identity.

Outside the block of flats where we spent our last months in Budapest.

Language holds the key to the newcomer's experience. It determines the extent to which the migrant may find a congenial place within his new world. His future—whether of contentment and a sense of belonging, or of isolation and, at best, imprisonment within a tightly-knit group—ultimately depends on how efficiently the new language is acquired. The achievement of that essential feat relies on a large number of factors, of which age and general linguistic ability are probably the most important. Some people find it easier to learn languages than others; the young generally experience much less difficulty than adults. With adults, cultural habits and level of education play a most important role. A well-educated person is more likely to prosper in a new language than an illiterate, though there are always exceptions.

For migrants, learning a language implies far more than the acquisition of a vocabulary and grammar. Some of the most unfortunate people among my parents' acquaintances were several cultivated men and women who had an excellent reading ability in English, representing at times the habit of a lifetime, who nevertheless could not make the transition from a basically literary and cultural use of the language to idiomatic speech. Their precise, clumsy, often excessively elaborate attempts at spoken English proved an almost insuperable barrier in those trivial and mundane transactions where linguistic proficiency is tested. At times these people gave offence because there seemed to be something mocking and dismissive in their pompous formality. The truth was, of course, that they were merely using inappropriate tools—they spoke like heavily accented parodies of characters in Dickens because for them writers like Dickens had provided a norm and a model. Their ears were too accustomed to those literary cadences to recognise that what they heard around them each day was in many ways a different language. By contrast, people who learnt English in a haphazard and wholly unsystematic way, as my mother did, were frequently able to communicate freely, because they had a grasp of idiom and had achieved an unconscious recognition of the connection between language and the social reality it conveys. That they spoke in a garbled grammar, or that they never mastered the intricacies of accentuation did not matter very much. Though they always remained quaint, and their speech gave rise at times to amusement, they nevertheless lived within Australian society, even if their position was very close to the margin.

The process of learning a language in such circumstances is essentially indescribable. Once you have learnt what you had not known until then, the former state of ignorance becomes to all intents and purposes incapable of recovery. I am able to remember a time when the meaning of very ordinary English words was unknown to me. I can recall vividly certain occasions when a hitherto meaningless sequence of sounds or letters suddenly acquired sense, when these sounds or letters no longer formed a tantalising puzzle. I can also recall the frustration and disorientation of those early days in Sydney when the sounds we heard around us and the written messages we saw everywhere—shop-signs, newspaper headlines, advertising hoardings claiming our attention from all sides—were no more than a menacing jumble of insoluble riddles. What I cannot remember at all precisely, though, is the mechanism of that process of learning, nor the point at which the confidently English-speaking child or adolescent finally emerged. The reason for the lack of precise and identifiable memories involves more than the mere passage of time or lapses of memory. It has a great deal to do with the linguistic identity of the individual who is engaged in an attempt to recapture the past.

If I were asked what is my first or native language I would have to say Hungarian, though I am not at all certain that until my fourth or fifth year German would not have had an equal claim. But clearly, my principal language is neither Hungarian nor German, but English. I grew up in English, my adult self is English-speaking and, more importantly, my conceptual and intellectual life exists only within an English-language context. I do not know the Hungarian expressions for countless abstract concepts I use in my everyday life. Nor can I remember the Hungarian words for many commonplace objects. When I lost a glove on a cold winter day in Budapest in 1990, 1 could not think of the word for glove; a shopkeeper who spoke English had to help me out. I look back on the past therefore from the perspective of English, a language which has shaped my concepts and attitudes. I cannot recapture or convey the experience of learning, of growing familiar with a new language and a new society, because what I was then learning and attempting to absorb is now familiar, it has become an integral part of my self.

In the course of such a process, to learn is also to forget—but not entirely. You can remember events; you may recapture the emotions and the atmosphere of a particular time of your life; humiliations, anxieties and anguish leave indelible marks on your personality. These may be recovered from the past. And there remains, moreover, an ineradicable substratum of your ‘native' language ready to pop up like a malicious imp at the least provocation. Yet for me the process of learning inevitably involved the act of unlearning. In my teens I did everything to avoid having to speak Hungarian, assuring my parents' acquaintances that I had forgotten the language. That was, of course, a long way from the truth. Yet Hungarian was in the process of becoming a secondary language. The act of forgetting represented as much a self-willed and symbolic assertion as a natural and inevitable process. This was largely the result of a naive and, it seems to me in retrospect, tiresomely aggressive attempt to become a genuine Australian. It was due in large measure to my inability to reconcile the social, emotional and psychological claims of my two languages.

Hungarian, like most other European tongues, possesses an elaborate system of address which draws subtle distinctions between the familiar and the respectful. Like Italian and German, but unlike French, it uses third-person forms where circumstances demand a polite mode of address. Children may use the second-person to address other children, close members of their family and, perhaps most significantly, servants. All other adults must be addressed obliquely in the third-person. The point at which adults may pass from the third-person to the second is determined by the same conditions that allowed people to be on ‘first-name terms' in English-speaking societies before the days of the ubiquitous Christian name. Significantly though, Hungarian permits the use of first names at much earlier stages of a relationship than English does, always with the proviso that such a liberty must be accompanied by the formal or respectful use of third-person forms until a degree of intimacy is achieved. To employ the second-person any earlier would be deeply offensive. A deliberate policy of the Germans and of their Hungarian henchmen during the war was to shout commands in the second-person at groups of people they had rounded up for transportation to Auschwitz, or else to line them up on the banks of the Danube (often where the famous and much-patronised cafes were located) to be sprayed with machine-gun fire. Political and physical brutality inevitably found its mirror in language.

This characteristic of Hungarian is accompanied, moreover, by an elaborate system of social usage which ensures the maintenance of rigid distinctions between the child and the adult, the servant and the master, the powerful and the weak. Well brought up children are expected to address their elders in terms faintly reminiscent of the elaborate ceremonies of the Sun King's court. In my childhood, you were expected to say that you wanted to kiss grown-ups' hands whenever you met them, even though to kiss someone's hand, at least in my parents' circle, would have been considered precocious and offensive. That privilege was reserved for grown men when they met ladies of their acquaintance; it was at times accompanied by the loud clicking of heels.